The piece opens with voice notes exchanged with my cousin in Tehran, my childhood best friend unseen for 27 years, as internet servers fall under shutdown and cyberattack, and moves outward: into the Persian concept of ghorbat, the open-ended strangeness of exile; into the false binary Western media has imposed between supporting foreign intervention and tolerating the Islamic Republic’s repression; and into a genealogy of American and Israeli interference that has historically destroyed the very conditions for democratic flourishing.